Tricycle Talks

Ada Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, and she recently completed her term as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Limón undertook a series of projects harnessing poetry to transform our relationship to the natural world, from installing poems on picnic benches in national parks across the country to engraving a poem on a spacecraft that is on its way to the second moon of Jupiter. In her new book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, she draws from her experience as Poet Laureate to argue that poetry can be a powerful force for healing, connection, and courage.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Limón to discuss why she views poetry as a sacred language, how poetry can help us move through the world with courage and equanimity, what it means for poetry to exist in the questions, and how reading and writing poetry can help us imagine a different type of future.

Arthur Sze is a poet and translator based in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and he is currently serving as the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. His new book, Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, takes readers through nearly two millennia of poetry from across the world and explores how translation can deepen our understanding and appreciation of poetry.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Sze to discuss why he views translation as the deepest form of reading, how poetry can prompt us toward moral and spiritual transformation, what it means for translation to be an impossible task, and how poetry can build bridges and connections across languages and cultures. Plus, Sze reads a few poems from the new collection.

Buddhism can often be mischaracterized as encouraging the elimination of emotion. Yet, as scholar Maria Heim points out, feeling is central to Buddhist teachings and practices—in fact, the Buddha presented the four noble truths as being “for one who feels.”

Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College, and her new book, How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions, presents new translations of essential early Buddhist teachings on emotion. Drawing from the Pali canon, she argues that the Buddhist psychology of emotions can offer us a different way of observing and relating to our feelings—and, in the process, bring about a sense of freedom.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Heim to discuss the misconception that Buddhism encourages the complete elimination of feeling, the paradoxical relationship between pleasure and pain in early Buddhist texts, how language can describe and shape experience, and how noticing our feelings can fundamentally restructure our behavior.

Daisy Hernández is an associate professor at Northwestern University and a Tricycle contributing editor. Her new book, Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth, blends memoir and political analysis to examine the shifting narratives around citizenship and what it means to be an American. This episode is a little different from our usual focus, but we wanted to talk with Hernández about how she brings her Buddhist practice to bear on this timely topic.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Hernández to discuss her own family’s immigration stories, why she views citizenship as a story or a myth, how she works with feelings of political despair, and what she’s learned from revisiting Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings on the Vietnam War in our current moment.

Philip Ryan is Tricycle’s executive editor, and he has worked at Tricycle on and off for the past thirty years. In the Spring issue of Tricycle, he wrote an article, "Old Friend," about his father’s dementia diagnosis and the questions it has raised about memory, impermanence, and identity.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Ryan to discuss how Buddhist teachings on the mind have helped him to make sense of his father’s diagnosis, why we are ultimately unknowable to each other and ourselves, and how dementia is the perfect illustration of the truths of impermanence, suffering, and nonself—or maybe a mockery of those truths.